A method, apparatus and system for zero shot object detection includes, in a semantic embedding space having embedded object class labels, training the space by embedding extracted features of bounding boxes and object class labels of labeled bounding boxes of known object classes into the space, determining regions in an image having unknown object classes on which to perform object detection as proposed bounding boxes, extracting features of the proposed bounding boxes, projecting the extracted features of the proposed bounding boxes into the space, computing a similarity measure between the projected features of the proposed bounding boxes and the embedded, extracted features of the bounding boxes of the known object classes in the space, and predicting an object class label for proposed bounding boxes by determining a nearest embedded object class label to the projected features of the proposed bounding boxes in the space based on the similarity measures.